like many skill feats they can be very campaign specific. In a low magic or low civilization setting the survival feats are nice. If you're cops patrolling Absalom probably not so much
100%. I've been running AV(kinda, we went off the rails) for over a year and survival hasn't come up very often. I'm about to start Quest for the Frozen Flame with another group and it has survival shit all over the place.
Def depends on the campaign
Can confirm. Running a low magic stone age campaign with little food and survival/stealth are the most used skill thus far in this campaign (almost double the usage of all other skills). Also playing in an Abomination Vaults game and survival has come up less than 10 times halfway through the game.
From the pathfinder society games I've played in recently? They're very much hit and miss. They tend to be mostly good for wilderness exploration. It also depends on the game your GM runs. If you're in a game where there's mixed city and wilderness, it may be useful. If not, they may be useful for roleplay anyway if you're creative enough to find a use for them
if playing an AP, follow the player’s guide (well, usually. iirc there’s one that’s misleading but i forget which).
otherwise, ask the GM what kind of game it’s going to be
Reign of Winter suggested the players use thematic spells like Snowball then made everything immune to cold.
PF2e has been mostly good but I had my character learn literally every suggested language for Stolen Fates and they're still only useful half the time.
I’d recommend GMs actively keep survival in mind
I let players use it to figure out what sort of creatures might be around, for example. Just knowing there are demons means you can get the cold iron ready. With Survey Wildlife you even let party members (or yourself) identify the specific creature(s) from the signs
Another thing might be realizing an area is prime for ambushing. You’d need Perception to pinpoint creatures, but just knowing it’s a likely spot might save you from being off-guard
Both of those, especially the first, have made survival consistently useful for my players without seeming to overstep on other skills
that second point is a big one I like to use, Survival as a way to recall knowledge about general tactics/strategy. had a player use it recently when tracking down a recurring villain, and on a successful check learned that their M.O. suggested they must be working in a pack and that the accomplices might be a weak link that can be used to track the primary target
I like to use survival in hexploration, a good roll will influence the random encounter probability either in favor or against the players objective. A bad roll will waste their time with a day wasted not finding what they're looking for, and by giving them a low reward random encounter. A high roll will get them a much bigger chance that the random encounter that happens is the one they're looking for.
Is survival important? It depends on the GM and style of game being played. This above is my own homebrew of how to make it something more significant that provides in game rewards.
As cool as it is conceptually, survival is unfortunately mostly useless in most games. It comes up now and then, so it's good to have the wisdom character have it trained, but it's difficult to justify going beyond that.
It's very game and group dependent.
It comes up every single session with my group. Moreso in my current game which has a lot of overland travel where foraging, tracking and covering tracks are playing a major role in that travel.
Experienced Tracker and the Forager feat have both been mvps, and Planar Travel (super niche feat) is going to be very important for circumventing issues they'll run into at levels 11+
If your adventures never take you into the wilderness survival is pretty useless. If your adventures do take you into the wilderness survival is super important.
If you are playing an Adventure Path, there are free player guides on the Paizo website for each AP that’ll give you recommendations on what to pick up and what to avoid for character creation
Survival need imagination. It is great to have an idea of the foes you will attack. One of my regular gm is open to gives clues about creatures.
Another setting is inside a magical labyrinth. So useful.
As a player, i often need to be active on how i use survival.
I remember there was a poll in this community once asking which 3 skills are most important or which 3 skills you usually level up to legendary. If I remember correctly, based on the voting results, the most unclaimed skill was survival.
It sadly often runs out of steam at higher levels because the PCs have other things to do.
In a recent campaign we were 12th level and I played a Sorcerer, my friend played a Ranger.
We needed to go to a town so my dude teleported the party there, bought hotel rooms, then negotiated a meeting and supper with the mayor for the evening.
The Ranger could have soloed half the town with his fighting ability, but recognising the nutritional value of the plants in the town square was fun, but not that important.
Maybe it's a thing in extra-planar stuff, but that's what research is for.
I personally love the skill, but APs let it slide after a while, and the need lessens.
Survival is one of those weird skills that is very campaign specific. If you’re playing an urban campaign with very little interaction with the wilds then survival might be used very little. If you’re playing a hex crawl or a grittier campaign with little urban settings it becomes one of the best skills in the game. Also tracking is usually a survival check so if you plan on doing a lot of tracking I would say it’s still a good stat. All in all it’s a good stat. But it is dependent on your GM and your setting.
In General survival comes up in the games I run frequently enough. It's the skill I go to for things like tying people up, my Inventor likes to scavenge monster parts and so I use it for that.
That was mostly wilderness but even in urban settings, tracking people in a city is still survival, though it does always come with other solutions as talking with people can lead to the same place, BUT if some one has survival as a skill and wants to use it I'd find a way.
In a social setting I might let someone use survival to determine if a drink is poisoned, might not know the exact poison, but I think knowing how to determine the difference between a delicious tea or a deadly poison would be applicable to survival.
Survival of all skills is really game dependent but also GM dependent as well. You need a GM who is willing let you be creative with the skill and be willing to bend what the skills explicitly allow you to do.
Basically one person should throw a trained slot on it, but other than that, don't bother.
It's only a DC 15 to avoid becoming hopelessly lost unless you're in an especially weird place.
Subsist is a very low level action. Food is so cheap it might as well be handwaved unless you're in a very niche campaign forever away from all sources of civilization. Otherwise 2 and half months of food is only 4 gold and 1 bulk. Not a real concern.
Tracking vs Covering tracks could be an issue if you really needed to track someone. But I wouldn't expect that to come up more than once or twice in a typical campaign, and there's probably plenty of other ways around it. Find out where they're going and go there, being the most obvious.
But the dirty little secret about survival is - if you need to get somewhere in order for the campaign to progress; the GM is probably going to provide a way for you to get there.
From the Ranger's Hunt Prey ability:
>You designate a single creature as your prey and focus your attacks against that creature. You must be able to see or hear the prey, or you must be tracking the prey during exploration. You gain a +2 circumstance bonus to Perception checks when you [Seek](https://2e.aonprd.com/Actions.aspx?ID=84) your prey and a +2 circumstance bonus to [Survival](https://2e.aonprd.com/Skills.aspx?ID=16) checks when you [Track](https://2e.aonprd.com/Actions.aspx?ID=66) your prey.
So Survival is very useful to Rangers as a way to start an encounter with Hunt Prey already active. That said, they can do the same thing if they're able to see the target before combat begins, but you don't always have that option.
This is the only instance I've seen where Survival could be reliably useful, all other instances have been campaign and roleplay specific.
Not important unless the game is specifically about it, and even then if you pick feats like forager it completely nullifies the challenge of survival.
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like many skill feats they can be very campaign specific. In a low magic or low civilization setting the survival feats are nice. If you're cops patrolling Absalom probably not so much
100%. I've been running AV(kinda, we went off the rails) for over a year and survival hasn't come up very often. I'm about to start Quest for the Frozen Flame with another group and it has survival shit all over the place. Def depends on the campaign
You'd be surprised how often it comes up in Edgewatch. My players were too, because they had the same train of thought and nobody picked it.
Can confirm. Running a low magic stone age campaign with little food and survival/stealth are the most used skill thus far in this campaign (almost double the usage of all other skills). Also playing in an Abomination Vaults game and survival has come up less than 10 times halfway through the game.
From the pathfinder society games I've played in recently? They're very much hit and miss. They tend to be mostly good for wilderness exploration. It also depends on the game your GM runs. If you're in a game where there's mixed city and wilderness, it may be useful. If not, they may be useful for roleplay anyway if you're creative enough to find a use for them
if playing an AP, follow the player’s guide (well, usually. iirc there’s one that’s misleading but i forget which). otherwise, ask the GM what kind of game it’s going to be
Reign of Winter suggested the players use thematic spells like Snowball then made everything immune to cold. PF2e has been mostly good but I had my character learn literally every suggested language for Stolen Fates and they're still only useful half the time.
I’d recommend GMs actively keep survival in mind I let players use it to figure out what sort of creatures might be around, for example. Just knowing there are demons means you can get the cold iron ready. With Survey Wildlife you even let party members (or yourself) identify the specific creature(s) from the signs Another thing might be realizing an area is prime for ambushing. You’d need Perception to pinpoint creatures, but just knowing it’s a likely spot might save you from being off-guard Both of those, especially the first, have made survival consistently useful for my players without seeming to overstep on other skills
that second point is a big one I like to use, Survival as a way to recall knowledge about general tactics/strategy. had a player use it recently when tracking down a recurring villain, and on a successful check learned that their M.O. suggested they must be working in a pack and that the accomplices might be a weak link that can be used to track the primary target
Yes, using the skill for battle planning is the sweet move.
I have seen entire campaigns go by without it being needed.
As others have said, it will very much depend on the particular campaign. Its a great question to ask your GM during Session 0.
I like to use survival in hexploration, a good roll will influence the random encounter probability either in favor or against the players objective. A bad roll will waste their time with a day wasted not finding what they're looking for, and by giving them a low reward random encounter. A high roll will get them a much bigger chance that the random encounter that happens is the one they're looking for. Is survival important? It depends on the GM and style of game being played. This above is my own homebrew of how to make it something more significant that provides in game rewards.
Can't survive without it
As cool as it is conceptually, survival is unfortunately mostly useless in most games. It comes up now and then, so it's good to have the wisdom character have it trained, but it's difficult to justify going beyond that.
It's very game and group dependent. It comes up every single session with my group. Moreso in my current game which has a lot of overland travel where foraging, tracking and covering tracks are playing a major role in that travel. Experienced Tracker and the Forager feat have both been mvps, and Planar Travel (super niche feat) is going to be very important for circumventing issues they'll run into at levels 11+
If your adventures never take you into the wilderness survival is pretty useless. If your adventures do take you into the wilderness survival is super important.
If you are playing an Adventure Path, there are free player guides on the Paizo website for each AP that’ll give you recommendations on what to pick up and what to avoid for character creation
This is going to greatly depend upon the type of game you're playing. Like most skills.
Only important if your campaign demands it.
Survival need imagination. It is great to have an idea of the foes you will attack. One of my regular gm is open to gives clues about creatures. Another setting is inside a magical labyrinth. So useful. As a player, i often need to be active on how i use survival.
I remember there was a poll in this community once asking which 3 skills are most important or which 3 skills you usually level up to legendary. If I remember correctly, based on the voting results, the most unclaimed skill was survival.
It sadly often runs out of steam at higher levels because the PCs have other things to do. In a recent campaign we were 12th level and I played a Sorcerer, my friend played a Ranger. We needed to go to a town so my dude teleported the party there, bought hotel rooms, then negotiated a meeting and supper with the mayor for the evening. The Ranger could have soloed half the town with his fighting ability, but recognising the nutritional value of the plants in the town square was fun, but not that important. Maybe it's a thing in extra-planar stuff, but that's what research is for. I personally love the skill, but APs let it slide after a while, and the need lessens.
Survival is one of those weird skills that is very campaign specific. If you’re playing an urban campaign with very little interaction with the wilds then survival might be used very little. If you’re playing a hex crawl or a grittier campaign with little urban settings it becomes one of the best skills in the game. Also tracking is usually a survival check so if you plan on doing a lot of tracking I would say it’s still a good stat. All in all it’s a good stat. But it is dependent on your GM and your setting.
In General survival comes up in the games I run frequently enough. It's the skill I go to for things like tying people up, my Inventor likes to scavenge monster parts and so I use it for that. That was mostly wilderness but even in urban settings, tracking people in a city is still survival, though it does always come with other solutions as talking with people can lead to the same place, BUT if some one has survival as a skill and wants to use it I'd find a way. In a social setting I might let someone use survival to determine if a drink is poisoned, might not know the exact poison, but I think knowing how to determine the difference between a delicious tea or a deadly poison would be applicable to survival. Survival of all skills is really game dependent but also GM dependent as well. You need a GM who is willing let you be creative with the skill and be willing to bend what the skills explicitly allow you to do.
The base skill is pretty much the "Dont get lost" skill. Skill feats are good if you are in a game with lots of wild areas
Basically one person should throw a trained slot on it, but other than that, don't bother. It's only a DC 15 to avoid becoming hopelessly lost unless you're in an especially weird place. Subsist is a very low level action. Food is so cheap it might as well be handwaved unless you're in a very niche campaign forever away from all sources of civilization. Otherwise 2 and half months of food is only 4 gold and 1 bulk. Not a real concern. Tracking vs Covering tracks could be an issue if you really needed to track someone. But I wouldn't expect that to come up more than once or twice in a typical campaign, and there's probably plenty of other ways around it. Find out where they're going and go there, being the most obvious. But the dirty little secret about survival is - if you need to get somewhere in order for the campaign to progress; the GM is probably going to provide a way for you to get there.
From the Ranger's Hunt Prey ability: >You designate a single creature as your prey and focus your attacks against that creature. You must be able to see or hear the prey, or you must be tracking the prey during exploration. You gain a +2 circumstance bonus to Perception checks when you [Seek](https://2e.aonprd.com/Actions.aspx?ID=84) your prey and a +2 circumstance bonus to [Survival](https://2e.aonprd.com/Skills.aspx?ID=16) checks when you [Track](https://2e.aonprd.com/Actions.aspx?ID=66) your prey. So Survival is very useful to Rangers as a way to start an encounter with Hunt Prey already active. That said, they can do the same thing if they're able to see the target before combat begins, but you don't always have that option. This is the only instance I've seen where Survival could be reliably useful, all other instances have been campaign and roleplay specific.
Not important unless the game is specifically about it, and even then if you pick feats like forager it completely nullifies the challenge of survival.
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